Previously, the oldest known civilisations were the Harrapan and Indus Valley communities - which date from around 2,500BC.

Murli Manohar Joshi, minister for human resources and ocean development, told The Times of India: "The findings buried 40 metres below the sea reveal some sort of human civilisation, a courtyard, staircase, a bathroom or a temple."

Researchers used carbon-dating techniques. The find was made by the Indian ocean development and archaeology institutes.

Marine scientists in India say an archaeological site off India's western coast may be up to 9,000 years old.

The revelation comes some 18 months after acoustic images from the sea-bed suggested the presence of built-up structures resembling the ancient Harappan civilisation which dates back around 4,000 years.

The Harappan civilisation is the oldest in the subcontinent.

Although Palaeolithic sites dating back around 20,000 years have been found on the coast of India's western state of Gujarat before, this is the first time there are indications of man-made structures as old as 9,500 years found deep beneath the sea.

Search impeded

Known as the Gulf of Cambay, the area has been subject to a great deal of archaeological interest due to its proximity to another ancient submerged site - Dwaraka - in the nearby Gulf of Kutch.

But investigations in the Cambay region have been made more difficult by strong tidal currents running at around 2 to 3 metres per second.

They impede any sustained underwater studies.

Marine scientists led by the Madras-based National Institute of Ocean Technology say they got around this problem by taking acoustic images off the sea-bed and using dredging equipment to extract artefacts.

A second round of investigations was conducted around three months ago.

'Glorious past'

The Indian Minister for Ocean Technology, Murli Manohar Joshi, told journalists the images indicated not only symmetrical man-made structures but also a paleo-river running for around nine kilometres on whose banks all the artefacts were discovered.

Experts say submerged pottery may offer a clue

Carbon dating carried out on one of these artefacts - a block of wood bearing the signs of deep fissures - dated it to around 7,595 BC.

Mr Joshi says his ministry plans to set up a multi-disciplinary group to look into what this discovery really means and what relation it may have to other ancient sites in the area.

Critics say the minister, who has been in the eye of a storm recently for attempts to Hinduise school history-text books, may well be presenting these archaeological discoveries as proof of India's glorious and ancient past.

But others say only further scientific studies can tell whether such a claim can be made at all.

Welllll....it's kind of a stretch, but I wish them luck. Actually, both Sumerian and Egyptian civilizations go back before 2500 BC, and the Indus Valley civilization may be even older, but this is a newspaper and not a textbook. Part of the problem is the definition of what constitutes a "civilization" - a collection of mud huts around a temple may or may not qualify depending on where you set the bar. I'll be following this story in the hopes they unearth more.

This is a public relations problem. Were the inhabitants of this palatial country estate actually Hindu, or were they related at all to the present inhabitants of India? There appear to be swamped and inundated stone city ruins all around the planet, both New World, and Old World. These ruins appear to predate even the Indo-European roots of our modern languages. Any inscriptions?

"Any reliable time-frame estimate? If the town flooded in 7500 BC, it might have been around even longer."

I posted the only two mentions I've seen of this discovery. I expect any civilization found at this site will exceed the dates posted. The theories about the Sphinx being about 10k years old don't seem so foreign now, huh?

An archaeological site discovered nearly 140 years ago in southern India is now yielding a remarkable collection of early Stone Age tools found in association with ancient animal footprints.

The Attirampakkam site, discovered in Tamil Nadu state by British geologist Robert Bruce Foote in 1863, was littered with stone tools. It had been sporadically excavated over the years, but little was ever published about it. Then archaeologist Shanti Pappu of the Sharma Centre for Heritage Education made a startling discovery there in 1991. Beneath the layers of dirt and clay, his team found remnants of Acheulean tools  an Old World stone-tool technology that began about 1 million years ago and lasted for nearly 900,000 years.

The stone-tool assemblage, the first Paleolithic tools ever found in clay deposits anywhere in India, includes hand axes, cleavers, picks, awls, scrapers, knives and stone flakes that were used as tools, all crafted from local quartzite.

Pappu said 17 roughly oval, animal-like footprints were found this past year in the clay layer that held the tools. The footprints and three fossilized teeth also found in the clay may help scientists sort out Indias ancient environment.

This seasons excavations were important owing to the discovery of animal footprints in association with Acheulean artifacts, says Pappu. These factors render the site on par with other Achulean sites in East Africa and indicate its immense potential for long-term study.

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